This invention relates to a hand held motor-vibrated seeder for dispensing seeds sequentially into earth-containing pockets of a grower's seedling tray, otherwise known as a plug tray, or alternatively for dispensing seeds in a row spaced apart, or in a seedling tray (without pockets).
Such dispensing of small seeds has typically been done directly by hand, and rarely with special tools or machines. Home owners and other small scale growers tolerate the imprecision of dispensing directly by hand, and often compensate by awaiting the seeds to sprout after which they may then be thinned by hand.
For larger scale growers, the direct dispensing by hand is not tolerable because of the associated large labor costs. For commercial growers, there is described in my patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,955, issued May 16, 1995, a seeder that simultaneously picks up many individual seeds and simultaneously dispenses each one in a corresponding of regularly spaced apart seedling-tray pockets.
For small scale growers, there has been used a hand held seeder having a handle and a V-shaped spatula mounted in the handle. A buzzer and a battery are mounted together and to the spatula end in that is mounted in the handel. Such buzzers have a coil of wire wound about an iron core and flexible conductive ferrous reed having one end fixidly mounted and the opposite end normally lying against an electrical contact. One end of the wire coil is electrically connected to the fixed end of the reed.
When a voltage is applied to the contact and the other end of the wire coil, the reed and contact serve momentarily as a closed electrical switch, causing a current in the coil that produces a magnetic field that draws the other end of the reed to hammer the core, ending a first vibration cycle. This breaks the circuit and the reed falls back on the contact which begins a sequence of such cycles of buzzer vibrations.
It is an object of this invention to provide a hand held seed-at-a-time seed dispenser providing improved seed singulation and dispensing accuracy. It is another object of this invention to provide such a seed dispenser having a vibrating motor with an eccentric rotor.